Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Who to Believe? Dissenting Voices in a Text

This essay is not about history—that is, it is not about what actually happened in the past.  It is an essay on how we create the past.  Every text contains the seeds of its own destruction; that is to say, every text contains points at which the integrity of the text breaks down and undermines itself.  In short, these points render the text ambiguous, leaving a perplexed reader to ask, what's going on here?
            Here are several examples; some are well known and others not so well known.  John 4:2 is perhaps the best known since the statements are positioned one within the other.  In John 4:1 the narrator informs the reader that it was common knowledge that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John the Baptizer.  In 4:2 a dissenting voice emerges dividing the sentence that begins in 4:1 (a subordinate clause) and concludes in 4:3 (the main clause).  Clearly the dissenting voice disagrees with the narrator.  The dissenter asserts that Jesus himself did not personally perform any baptisms, but the narrator equally assertively insists that he did perform baptisms, and that it was common knowledge that he did.  Note that translators of the text recognize the disagreement, and place John 4:2 in parentheses.  Who should we believe—the primary narrator of John or the dissenting voice that corrects the narrator?
            By my count there are at least 121 of these "clarifications" in the text of John.  Another example is found in the narrative of the feeding of the five thousand (John 6:5-14).  The reader is told that the healings Jesus performed (the narrator calls them "signs") created a sensation, and as a result a great crowd followed him (John 6:2), which the reader later discovers numbered five thousand (John 6:10).  Jesus takes 5 barley loaves and two fish and feeds this huge crowd and has five baskets of fragments left over from the barley loaves (John 6:13).  The narrator's positive climax to the feeding story is that "when the people saw the sign," they confessed Jesus as "the prophet who is to come into the world" (John 6:14).  Imagine the reader's surprise to learn a little later that the Jesus character in the narrative disagrees with the narrator's judgment: "Jesus answered them…you seek me not because you saw signs, but ate your fill of the loaves" (John 6:26).  Should we believe the narrator or the Jesus character?  Was the crowd persuaded by the sign they had witnessed or because their bellies were full (John 6:12)?
            In John 7:22 again a dissenting voice interrupts a compound sentence by the Jesus character in the narrative:  Jesus asserts to his interlocutors in the temple (the Judahites), "Moses gave you circumcision, and you circumcise a person on the Sabbath."  Translators put the dissenting statement that follows in parentheses to show that it is not part of what Jesus said to the Judahites, but rather is an aside directly addressing the reader.  The dissenting voice corrects the assertion of Jesus by saying, "not that it is from Moses but from the fathers."  Those who prepared the critical Greek text found the dissenting voice so disruptive that they set the dissenting statement off with dashes, as they also did in John 4:2.  Who should a reader of John think has provided the correct response: the Jesus character or the dissenting voice?
            The phenomenon is not limited to the Gospel of John; another interesting disagreement is found in Mark 5:22-24, 35-43.  A synagogue ruler (Jairus) implores Jesus to come heal his twelve year old daughter, who at that moment was at the point of death (5:23).   Jesus goes with him (5:24), but he is delayed by another healing (5:25-34).  At that moment Jairus received word that his daughter in the meanwhile had died (5:35), but Jesus ignored the report urging the synagogue ruler to "only believe" (5:36).  Upon arriving at the home of Jairus loud lamentations are in progress because of the child's death (5:38).  Before he sees the child, Jesus asserts to the mourners that "the child is not dead but sleeping" (5:39), and the mourners laughed at him (5:40).  When they went into the building Jesus took the child by the hand and said "arise" and immediately the girl got up (5:41-42).  Was the Jesus character correct and the girl only sleeping, or were the mourners correct and the girl was dead?  In short the problem is this: is the story about the resuscitation of a dead child (i.e., the mourners were right), or is the story about the healing of a sick child (i.e., the Jesus character was right)?
            The raw data of history are often contradictory forcing historians to choose between the more probable and the less probable.  What eventually becomes history in these judgmental situations is what a preponderance of historians decides to call history.  In the segment from Mark above the historical issue is: what is the nature of the story, a healing narrative or a story about the raising of a dead girl.  In the Gospel of John the issue is which voice is the final authority for reading John: that of the primary narrator or that of the dissenter.
 
Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University
 
Charles W. Hedrick, "Authorial Presence and Narrator in John. Commentary and Story" in Goehring, Hedrick, Sanders, and Betz, eds., Gospel Origins and Christian Beginnings (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1990), 74-93.
 
Hedrick, "Miracle Stories as Literary Compositions: The Case of Jairus's Daughter," Perspectives in Religious Studies 20.3 (Fall 1993), 217-33. 

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Charlie, do you know of any resources that categorizes these second-voice clarifications?

Here are samples, it would seem, of at least three different categories: (1) No contradictions: In the Jairus story, for example, one might say that there are simply two different opinions and that Jesus acted on his own opinion (the girl was asleep or comatose).(2) Contradictions possibly reconciled through comparative evidence: In the John material about baptizing one has two opinions that can't be reconciled, but, to help form an opinion, there is material in the other gospels which could suggest no baptizing. (3) Contradictions which may be resolved through textual research: Luke 5:37-39, e.g., where Jesus seems to be endorsing both new wine and old wine, seemingly in contradictory fashion. The "old wine" reference (vs. 39) "is unattested for Marcion's Evangelion and absent from Gk ms D, the OL, and the texts of Luke known to Irenaeus and Eusebius." (Beduhn, The First New Testament, 135).

Gene Stecher
Chambersburg, PA

Charles Hedrick said...

Hi Gene,
Thanks for engaging the problem. In answer to your question about categorizing the dissenting or clarifying voices in the text of John, I do precisely that in the first article listed at the bottom of the essay, as well as track the history of scholarship on the phenomenon.
The second article I list at the bottom of the essay discusses Jairus' daughter as a literary composition and the disagreements in point of view on the part of the characters in the literary composition.
Cordially,
Charlie

Anonymous said...

Charlie, if you would, please comment on this possible example of a second voice in the text of Mark:

1st, Mark 4: 10-11 "...those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables...to you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything comes in parables, in order 'that they may...not perceive...not understand...not turn again and be forgiven.'" Do you not understand this parable? (and then he goes on to explain the parable of the sower.)...34...he explained everything in private to his disciples.

2nd, Mark 4:21"And he said to them (the same group as above), 'Is a lamp brought in to be put under a bushel basket...22...nothing is secret except to come to light...(parables of Growing Seed and Mustard Seed)...33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it...

To my mind there's two intertwined voices in chapter 4, one saying that the parables are meant to "hide" things and the other one saying that they are meant to bring things to light and are spoken at the hearer's level of understanding. And was either the voice of Jesus?

Gene Stecher
Chambersburg, Pa.

Anonymous said...

Charlie, may I ask you to comment also on another example of a possible second voice in Mark, in this case 9:33-37, 42-49.

The disciples argue over who is greatest, and Jesus teaches that the last will be first and he welcomes a child into his arms: "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me" (vs. 37, 1st voice).

Then we find in 9:42 "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones (1st voice) WHO BELIEVE IN ME (2nd voice)..."

The words capitalized seem to represent a shift from generic children to community initiates. And the millstone around the neck, drowning, cutting off sinful body parts, found in the subsequent verses is also shiftedd from the rightful punishment of those who abuse children to the rightful punishment of those who lead initiates astray in some manner.

Gene Stecher
Chambersburg, Pa.

Charles Hedrick said...

Good afternoon Gene,
You are correct that there are conflicting traditions to be found in chapter four of Mark: one where Jesus tells parables to deliberately mystify (4:10-11; 4:34); and another where parables seem capable of being understood by the crowds (4:33 and 4:21-22). But I personally do not find here the same phenomenon of one voice correcting another one after the other such as it appeared in John. The fact that there have been different ideas in Mark about the purpose of the parables is something scholars have known for a long time. C. E., Carlston, Parables of the Triple Tradition (1975), 97-109 has a lengthy discussion and for a briefer discussion see my Many Things in Parables (2004), 30-34. Both have other references.
Cordially,
Charlie

Charles Hedrick said...

Hi Gene,
Thanks for calling attention to this interesting passage. I certainly agree with your observation that 9:42 is interpreting 9:37--that is the saying on children in 9:37 the evangelist Mark understands as a reference to disciples, or as you put it Christian initiates. At the risk of making a broad generalization, let me put it this way: the synoptic gospels have made greater use of oral tradition with slighter adaptation of the saying when incorporating it into their narratives than the gospel of John who rewrites what traditions he/she uses in the narrative and imprints his/her theology upon them to such an extent that sorting out the bits of oral tradition being used is very difficult if not impossible. John is essentially Johannine theology. Compare for example the Five Gospels where in the Gospel of John virtually nothing is thought to be red or pink material (I. e., reliable oral tradition) but in the Gospel of John, the text is printed mostly in black or regular print. In other word John is simply a blatant rewriting of the Jesus traditions and provides little recognizable earlier historical material. If you get a chance, check out my article on "Authorial Presence and Narrator in John," 75-77, where I describe the criteria for identifying a different corrective voice in the narrative from that of the principal narrator.
Cordially,
Charlie